Category: General

Well, I’ve been cycling for years but last year I bought a new road bike and hit the tarmac.

It’s great. As I’ve been watching the tour this week and seeing the thousands of spectators, it made me think of the dangers and hostility cycling brings.

I often feel sorry for the cyclists on Le Tour as sometimes, fighting the spectators becomes a bit of a hindrance. See Christophe Riblon pushing his way through the thousands of people cheering on. It almost looks impossible to get through. I saw Riblon have to push fans out of his way from knocking him off his bike shortly before winning a punishing Stage 18 of Le Tour.

In the real world

It’s a similar story in the real world, but not as flattering. I was out only last week, riding on a pot hole infested road in Rotherham when a Silver Ford Focus came flying round the corner after nearly knocking a friend I was riding with off his bike then narrowly passing myself. The car threw copper coins at me as I was cycling. You can’t avoid them but the roads are a dangerous place for cyclists.

A few weeks later another car flew close past me and screamed out of the window as they got within a foot of me. Some beep their horns, some shout abuse out the window.

If it’s not abuse, it’s incompetence. Drivers coming too close or overtaking in stupid locations. I was following a car at the same speed, close behind it, and the car behind me felt the need to overtake me. He was going nowhere, ended up heard first towards an oncoming car, slammed the brakes on and fell behind. Complete idiot. He obviously thought it was my fault.

I still love the cycling, it’s mega liberating and great when you get a good rhythm going but the most dangerous part is often the idiots who drive on the roads. I love my car, but riding on the road on a bicycle opens your eyes to how scary it is when you’re riding on two skinny tyres.

So a few months ago, I was sat in my day job thinking “I wish I could do…”, “I wish this was done a certain way…” “I want to do…”.

I left Technophobia in 2012 after spending 2 years there and went to MadeByPi for a short stint as a UX designer. I’d decided that what I wanted to do was UX based. I wanted to sell these techniques I’d learnt on the front line. I wanted to meet people, network, interact, have time to do my own thing and challenge myself in a new way. Turning up at 9am and leaving at 5pm just wasn’t working for me. I’m used to pulling all nighters, actively challenging myself and working harder than the average human. I did this for a few years at Uni, and my final year was, well, mental.

So, now it’s time to do that all again! But this time I’m risking any savings I have in my bank account, and investing in starting up on my own. I created Divide. My goal for 2013 is to still be doing this in December. Making and designing websites and expanding my own business by helping others’. Whether it’s freelance with companies such as MadeByPi and Technophobia, or designing and creating with my own new clients, I hope I’m able to continue it for a long time to come.

We all love TED videos but this one specifically is one of my favourites. Looking through the data.gov.uk site I rediscovered this talk from 2009 where Tim Berners-Lee revisits 1989, the birth of the WWW. Nice to revisit this one.

Disclaimer: I understand it’s being replaced with Skype, and praise the lord!

A lot of people wonder why I use Mac software/hardware so religiously, and it has nothing to do with following the herd and has everything to do with usability and design. While OSX might not be the pinnacle of usability (finder is horrendous), in my opinion I couldn’t manage with their Microsofts legacy method of design. It’s been something which has annoyed me for years.

This article isn’t about WordPress so much, it’s about me. It seems at work WordPress is a taboo word. It’s greeted with gasps more often than not and I completely understand why. There are loads of alternatives, loads of better pieces of software and it’s riddled with a reputation of being vulnerable to attack. All of these are correct, but I still wanted to write about it to put my position on the software so if anyone confronts me, I don’t have to argue a case of why I think it’s both great, and terrible at the same time. Continue reading I used to be like WordPress

I recently launched the main website for Moonsync and it’s gone down extremely well. Moonsync is a project me and a colleague Ian Kelly have been doing in our spare time. It started off as a general idea Ian came up with which has now developed into a full scale platform for Android devices.

Think iCloud for Android, but better. Dear Apple:

One of the main gripes I have with iCloud, being an iPhone/Mac/iPad user is its fragmentation of services. The photo galleries I’ve created on my phone using the app, can’t be viewed easily online.

I was recently asked to work on a concept for [redacted], to show them the potential of a new design and what a fresh perspective can unearth in their current site. The idea behind this was that for the next meeting, the team would have “ammunition” to potentially drum up new business. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I thought it might help to explain my process. Because this design could potentially be presented, I needed an effective way of getting across my design decisions, as I might not be there to help the team out. Here’s what I did:

And now it’s 2012. I’ve been writing a lot of things over the last two years which have never made the light of day and as I sit here watching the closing ceremony for the olympics, I’m wondering what I’ll be doing 4 years from now. Hopefully still writing on this here blog.

I’ll be posting on UX stuff in the coming days in addition to general design and discussion points. Keep an eye out.